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PSEUDONYM(S): Rogers, Samuel Shepard
BIRTHDATE: 12/5/1943-7/27/2017
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 223
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PERSONAL
Born Samuel Shepard Rogers III November 5, 1943, in Fort Sheridan, IL; died of complications from ALS, July 27, 2017, in Midway, KY; son of Samuel Shepard and Elaine Rogers; married O-Lan Johnson Dark, November 9, 1969 (divorced 1984); partner of Jessica Lange, 1982-2009; children: (first marriage) Jesse Mojo; (with Lange) Hannah Jane, Samuel Walker.
EDUCATION:Attended Mount San Antonio College, 1960-61.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, beginning 1964. Conley Arabian Horse Ranch, Chino, CA, stable hand, 1958-60; Bishop’s Company Repertory Players (touring theater group), actor, 1962-63; Village Gate, New York, NY, busboy, 1963-64. Rock musician (drums and guitar) with Holy Modal Rounders, 1968-71; playwright in residence at Magic Theatre, San Francisco, CA, 1974-84. Actor in feature films, including Days of Heaven, 1978; Resurrection, 1980; Raggedy Man, 1981; Frances, 1982; The Right Stuff, 1983; Country, 1984; Fool for Love, 1985; Crimes of the Heart, 1986; Baby Boom, 1987; Steel Magnolias, 1989; The Hot Spot, 1990; Defenseless, 1991; Voyager, 1991; Thunderheart, 1992; The Pelican Brief, 1993; Silent Tongue, 1994; Safe Passage, 1994; Black Hawk Down, 2002; The Notebook, 2004; Stealth, 2005; Bandidas, 2006; Ruffian, 2007; and Brothers, 2009. Director of feature film Far North, 1988; actor in the Off-Broadway play A Number, 2004; narrator, Charlotte’s Web, 2006. Actor in the television series Bloodline, Netflix, 2015.
AVOCATIONS:Polo, rodeo.
AWARDS:Yale University fellowship, 1967; Guggenheim foundation memorial fellowships, 1968 and 1971. Obie Awards for best plays of the Off-Broadway season, Village Voice, 1966, for Chicago, Icarus’s Mother, and Red Cross, 1967, for La Turista, 1968, for Forensic and the Navigators and Melodrama Play, 1973, for The Tooth of Crime, 1975, for Action, 1977, for Curse of the Starving Class, 1979, for Buried Child, and 1984, for Fool for Love; grant, University of Minnesota, 1966; grant, Rockefeller Foundation, 1967; National Institute and American Academy award for literature, 1974; creative arts award, Brandeis University, 1975-76; Pulitzer Prize for drama, 1979, for Buried Child; Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1984, for The Right Stuff; Golden Palm Award, Cannes Film Festival, 1984, for Paris, Texas; New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, 1986, for A Lie of the Mind; American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Drama, 1992; Theater Hall of Fame, 1994; Tony Award for best play nomination, 2000, for revised version of True West.
WRITINGS
Also author, with Robert Frank, of Me and My Brother, and with Murray Mednick, of Ringaleerio.
SIDELIGHTS
Sam Shepard devoted more than two decades to a highly eclectic—and critically acclaimed—career in the performing arts. He was considered the preeminent literary playwright of his generation. Shepard also directed plays of his authorship, played drums and guitar in rock bands and jazz ensembles, and acted in major feature films. “To fans of underground music,” wrote Randall Roberts in a Los Angeles Times obituary, “… Shepard served a lesser-known role as the drummer for seminal New York avant-garde folk band the Holy Modal Rounders, with whom he performed on the crucial late 1960s albums `Indian War Whoop’ and `The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders.'” His movie appearances included leading roles in The Right Stuff and Country, but acting was a sideline for the man Newsweek writer Jack Kroll called “the poet laureate of America’s emotional Badlands.” Despite his success in Hollywood, Shepard is primarily a playwright whose dramas explore mythic images of modern America in the nation’s own eccentric vernacular.
Shepard established himself by writing numerous one-act plays and vignettes for the Off-Off-Broadway experimental theater. He has won eleven Obie Awards for best Off-Broadway plays, a Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child, and a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1986 for A Lie of the Mind. His plays use modern idiomatic language as well as prevailing themes of American popular culture, particularly the American West, Hollywood, and the rock-and-roll industry.
Shepard’s modern cowboys, drifters, farmers, and other offspring of the frontier era yearn for a purer past that may never have existed as they quarrel with family members. Journal of Popular Culture contributor George Stambolian maintained that, like many of his fellow playwrights, Shepard “knows that the old frontier myths of America’s youth are no longer a valid expression of our modern anxieties, even though they continue to influence our thoughts.” Stambolian said Shepard seeks “a new mythology that will encompass all the diverse figures of our cultural history together with the psychological and social conditions they represent. … Shepard’s greatest contribution to a new American mythology may well be his elaboration of a new myth of the modern artist.”
Malicious mischief and comic mayhem intensify Shepard’s tragic vision; in many of his plays, inventive dialogue supplements vigorous action. Richard L. Homan noted in Critical Quarterly: “Shepard’s vivid use of language and flair for fantasy have suggested something less like drama and more like poetry in some unfamiliar oral tradition.” While Shepard’s subjects—nostalgia, power struggles, family tensions—may seem simple at first, his plays remain “extraordinarily resistant to thematic exegesis,” Richard Gilman wrote in his introduction to Seven Plays by Sam Shepard. Gilman added that standard criticism of Shepard is inadequate because the dramatist “slips out of all the categories” and seems to have come “out of no literary or theatrical tradition at all but precisely for the breakdown or absence—on the level of art if not of commerce—of all such traditions in America.” Gilman added that several of the plays “seem like fragments, chunks of various sizes thrown out from some mother lode of urgent and heterogeneous imagination in which [Shepard] has scrabbled with pick, shovel, gun-butt and hands. The reason so many of them seem incomplete is that they lack the clear boundaries as artifact, the internal order, the progress toward a denouement … and the consistency of tone and procedure that ordinarily characterize good drama.”
In American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, Michael Earley remarked that Shepard “seems to have forged a whole new kind of American play that has yet to receive adequate reckoning.” Earley called the playwright “a true American primitive, a literary naif coursing the stage of American drama as if for the first time” who brings to his work “a liberating interplay of word, theme and image that has always been the hallmark of the romantic impulse. His plays don’t work like plays in the traditional sense but more like romances, where the imaginary landscape (his version of America) is so remote and open that it allows for the depiction of legend, adventure, and even the supernatural.”
Shepard, born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, was given the name his forebears had used for six generations—Samuel Shepard Rogers. His father was a career army officer, so as a youngster Shepard moved from base to base in the United States and even spent some time in Guam. When Shepard’s father retired from the service, the family settled on a ranch in Duarte, California, where they grew avocados and raised sheep. Although the livelihood was precarious, Shepard enjoyed the atmosphere on the ranch and liked working with horses and other animals. Influenced by his father’s interest in Dixieland jazz, Shepard gravitated to music; he began to play the drums and started what Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor David W. Engel called “his lifelong involvement with rock-and-roll music and its subculture.” He graduated from Duarte High School in 1960 and spent one year studying agricultural science at the local junior college, but his family situation deteriorated as his father began drinking excessively. Shepard fled by joining a touring theatrical group called the Bishop’s Company Repertory Players. At age nineteen, he found himself in New York, determined to seek his fortune with only a few months’ acting experience.
By chance Shepard encountered a high school friend in New York, Charles Mingus, Jr., son of the renowned jazz musician. Mingus found Shepard a job at the Village Gate, a jazz club, and the two young men became roommates. While working at the Village Gate, Shepard met Ralph Cook, founder of the Off-Off-Broadway company Theatre Genesis. Cook encouraged Shepard to write plays, and Shepard produced Cowboys and The Rock Garden, two one-acts that became part of the first Theatre Genesis show at St. Mark Church in-the-Bowery. Though Engel noted that most of the critics regarded Shepard’s first two works as “bad imitations of Beckett.” Shepard began to rapidly turn out one-act pieces, many performed Off-Off-Broadway; they attracted a cult following within that theatrical circuit. Shepard also continued his association with jazz and rock music, incorporating the rhythms into his dialogue and including musical riffs in the scripts. Kroll said: “The true artist starts with his obsessions, then makes them ours as well. The very young Sam Shepard exploded his obsessions like firecrackers; in his crazy, brilliant early plays he was escaping his demons, not speaking to ours.” The Shepard one-acts, still frequently performed at theatre festivals and universities, juxtapose visual and verbal images with dramatic collage. Stambolian said the technique “forces the spectator to view the surface, so to speak, from behind, from within the imagination that conceived it.”
According to Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic, the deliberate use of movie types “is part of Shepard’s general method: the language and music of rock, spaceman fantasies, Wild West fantasies, gangster fantasies—pop-culture forms that he uses as building blocks, rituals of contemporary religion to heighten communion.”
Some critics have dismissed Shepard’s early work as undisciplined and obscure. Massachusetts Review essayist David Madden found the plays “mired in swampy attitudes toward Mom and Dad. Their main line of reasoning seems to be that if Mom and Dad’s middle class values are false, that if they and the institutions they uphold are complacent and indifferent, the only alternative is some form of outlaw behavior or ideology.” Other national drama critics have evaluated the one-act plays quite differently. In the New York Review of Books, Robert Mazzocco wrote: “If one is content to follow this hard-nosed, drug-induced, pop-flavored style, this perpetual retuning of old genres and old myths, one encounters, finally, a profuse and unique panorama of where we are now and where we have been.” Stambolian said that Shepard “is in fact showing to what extent the mind, and particularly the modern American mind, can become and has become entrapped by its own verbal and imaginative creations.”
Fool for Love, which Shepard also directed, is probably his best-known work. The one-act piece has been produced for the stage and has also been made into a feature film in which Shepard starred. Fool for Love alternates submission and rejection between two lovers who may also be half-brother and half-sister. New York Daily News writer Douglas Watt said the ninety-minute, nonstop drama “is Sam Shepard’s purest and most beautiful play. An aching love story of classical symmetry, it is … like watching the division of an amoeba in reverse, ending with a perfect whole.”
Shepard’s first major production, Operation Sidewinder, premiered at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in 1970. Engel described the two act play as “an excellent example of how [Shepard] combines the roles of poet, musician, and playwright.” Set in the Hopi Indian country of the American Southwest, Operation Sidewinder follows the attempts to control a huge, mechanical rattlesnake originally designed to trace unidentified flying objects. Air Force commandos, Hopi snake-worshippers, black power activists, and even a beautiful but foolish blonde named Honey try to use the computerized sidewinder for their own ends. Engel notes that the “playful and satiric action is amplified by Shepard’s production techniques. He assaults the senses of the audience by the use of intense sound and lights, and by various chants and songs.” Although Engel said “the psychological resonance of stylized production, and not its sociological satire, is Shepard’s aim,” some critics called the work overly moralistic and stylistically confusing. Kroll maintained that the play’s energy “has congealed in a half-slick pop machine with the feel of celluloid and the clackey sound of doctrinaire contemporaneity.” Martin Gottfried viewed the play differently in Women’s Wear Daily. “Everything about Sam Shepard’s Operation Sidewinder is important to our theatre,” Gottfried wrote. “More than any recent major production, it is built upon exactly the style and the mentality energizing the youth movement in America today.”
In 1971 Shepard took his wife and infant son and moved to England. Having long experimented with drugs, the playwright sought escape from the abusive patterns he saw destroying fellow artists in New York. He also hoped to become more involved with rock music, still a central obsession. He did not accomplish that goal, but as Engel noted, he did “write and produce some of his finest works” while living in London. Plays such as Angel City, Geography of a Horse Dreamer, and The Tooth of Crime explore various aspects of the artist/ visionary’s dilemma when faced with public tastes or corporate profit-taking. Mazzocco felt that at this stage in his career Shepard chose to examine “not so much in political or economic parallels as in those of domination and submission, the nature of power in America. Or, more precisely, the duplicitous nature of ‘success’ and ‘failure,’ where it’s implied that a failure of nerve and not that of a ‘life’ is at the basis of both.”
The Tooth of Crime further strengthened Shepard’s literary reputation. A two-act study of rock-and-roll stars who fight to gain status and “turf,” the play “depicts a society which worships raw power,” in Engel’s words. Mazzocco called The Tooth of Crime “undoubtedly the quintessential Shepard play” and “a dazzlingly corrosive work … one of the most original achievements in contemporary theater. It is also the play that best illustrates the various facets—at once highly eclectic and highly singular—of [Shepard’s] genius.” The Tooth of Crime, represented a stylistic departure for Shepard. The transition, however, from modernist to traditional style has hardly been smooth. According Homan, Shepard has learned “to express the outrage, which gave rise to the experimental theatre, in plays which work through realistic conventions to challenge our everyday sense of reality.”
Four of Shepard’s plays, Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, True West, and A Lie of the Mind, document in scenes of black humor the peculiar savagery of modern American family life. Buried Child and A Lie of the Mind, separated by seven years, examine disturbed families. In Buried Child, son Vince arrives at his midwestern farm home after a long absence. A dangerous cast of relatives confronts him, harboring secrets of incest and murder. Richard Christiansen, in the Chicago Tribune, called the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “a Norman Rockwell portrait created for Mad magazine, a scene from America’s heartland that reeks with ‘the stench of sin.’” Similarly, A Lie of the Mind presents a tale of two families that are galvanized into violence when a jealous husband beats his wife, almost fatally. A Lie of the Mind won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best new Off-Broadway play of 1985, and Shepard himself directed the original production.
Beginning in 1978 Shepard accepted major movie role for several years in a row, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Right Stuff. Despite his discomfort with the image, he assumed a certain matinee idol status. Shepard often contradicted his own persona. In Country, for instance, he portrayed a farmer who wilts under pressure when threatened with foreclosure, and in Fool for Love he appeared as a womanizing, luckless rodeo rider.
In 1983, German director Wim Wenders commissioned Shepard to write a screenplay based loosely on the playwright’s book Motel Chronicles. The resulting work, Paris, Texas, was a unanimous winner of the Golden Palm Award at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. The film recasts many of Shepard’s central concerns—broken families, the myth of the loner, and the elegy for the old West—in a story of reunion between a father and a son.
In addition to his career as a playwright and actor, Shepard is also the author of numerous short stories, which are collected in Cruising Paradise: Tales, Great Dream of Heaven: Stories, and Day out of Days: Stories. Shepard turned to fiction late in his career, publishing these volumes from 1996 to 2010. The stories in Cruising Paradise were composed between 1989 and 1995, and are set largely in rural areas around Mexico and the United States. Death and the perils of manhood dominate the collection, featuring boys who attempt to care for a wolf and a boy whose father burns to death in a motel. Another man takes his life in a roadside bathroom. A sense of loneliness pervades the volume, and Booklist writer Donna Seaman felt that Shepard creates an “intense fictional universe” in which “the tough beauty of the land can barely be discerned through ‘all the human mess.’” According to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “even as it plumbs shocking darkness, [Shepard’s] writing here exhibits the gentleness and lyricism that has distinguished his acclaimed work for the stage.”
Great Dream of Heaven also fared well with critics, and American Theatre reviewer Frank J. Baldaro called it “an unalloyed triumph.” The tales are mostly told from the third person, and they stylistically resemble fables. Yet, rather than taking on the fantastic, Shepard instead portrays southern and midwestern characters that are in the midst of existential and spiritual crises. Marriages fall apart, sons struggle to connect with their fathers, and friendships fail. Seaman, again writing in Booklist, found that “Shepard’s mastery as a short story writer reflects his gifts as both playwright and actor,” but a Kirkus Reviews critic stated that some of the stories are “false starts, some disguised plays, some genuinely elegant pieces.” Based on this, the critic called the collection “varied and risky, with brilliances and blunders on an occasional basis.” Seconding this opinion in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Jim Higgins admitted that “this collection isn’t uniformly brilliant.” However, he also commented: “Shepard’s writing is consistently excellent. He’s not a minimalist; he’s a master of reduction sauces—maximum flavor in a minimum volume. His vision can be dark, but it is also often funny and he remains open to the possibility of transcendence.” In Kliatt, Nola Theiss wrote that “Shepard’s prose is as lean and spare as he is. His writing cuts to the bone.” Baldaro simply called Great Dream of Heaven “a series of lean, fraught tableaux, Great Dream of Heaven shimmers with humor, absurdity, pathos and a stubborn taciturnity.”
The pieces in Day out of Days are a literary pastiche, ranging from stories to travelogues to journal entries. Throughout the extensive and varied collection, three men wander without purpose, seemingly drunk, searching for someone. The diverse formats “may tempt readers to dismiss this new collection … as a literary grab bag,” a Kirkus Reviews critic remarked, “they will be richly surprised by its thematic depth and coherence.” Susan Salter Reynolds, writing in the Los Angeles Times, was also impressed, finding that “you can construct a body out of the stories, poems and inside-the-head dialogues in Sam Shepard’s Day out of Days—as in that game, Exquisite Corpse. You fold up the paper and each person draws a different part. When you unfold the paper, you’ve got a funky body. This is the reason people always use words like ‘brutal,’ ‘haunting’ and ‘lean’ to describe Shepard’s work: Each part is howling out some unfinished business. It’s not the aggression or the violence that gets you. It’s the cacophonous need.”
In The One Inside, Shepard’s first novel, the writer explored his own past through the lens of fiction. “Fans of his short stories and autobiographical writings,” stated Ron Charles in the Washington Post Book World, “will hear echoes of the playwright’s life all across this familiarly bleak landscape.” The complex work purports to be the story of how the narrator is blackmailed by a much younger woman, who has recorded their telephone conversations—but it is also the story of the narrator’s relationship with his father, now many years dead. “At turns, Shepard’s story morphs from novel, with recurring characters and structured narrative, into prose poem, with lysergic flashes of brilliance and amphetamine stutters.” “Shepard is a master of conflicting emotions and haunting regrets,” said Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, “and … this is a ravishing tale of deep-dark cosmic humor.”
Shepard died of complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease) in July, 2017. He was immediately eulogized by writers from across the world, who recognized the power of his prose and his acting. Shepard “excelled as an actor, screenwriter, playwright and director. In each of those disciplines he challenged and reimagined mythic American archetypes,” said Ryan Gilbey in the London Guardian, which “established him as one of the visionaries of US theatre and created a fresh vernacular for exploring the disparity in American life between myth and reality, past and present, fathers and sons…. He took flawed macho heroes who might have staggered out of an Anthony Mann western, and broken, overheated families redolent of a Tennessee Williams clan, and forced them into claustrophobic hothouse scenarios; the result was like Beckett performed in cowboy duds.” “Speaking of how he creates his characters,” declared Ben Brantley in a New York Times obituary, “Mr. Shepard once perfectly summed up the artful ambiguity that pervades his work and is a principal reason it seems likely to endure: ‘There are these territories inside all of us, like a child or a father or the whole man,’ he said, ‘and that’s what interests me more than anything: where those territories lie. I mean, you have these assumptions about somebody and all of a sudden this other thing appears. Where is that coming from? That’s the mystery. That’s what’s so fascinating.’”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Almanac of Famous People, 6th edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.
Auerbach, Doris, Sam Shepard, Arthur Kopit, and the Off Broadway Theater, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1982.
Banham, Martin, editor, The Cambridge Guide to World Theatre, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1988.
Bowman, John S., editor, Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1996.
Contemporary Dramatists, 6th edition, St. James (Detroit, MI), 1999.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 4, 1975, Volume 6, 1976, Volume 17, 1981, Volume 34, 1985, Volume 41, 1987, Volume 44, 1987.
Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television, Volume 25, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2000,
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 8: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 1981, Volume 212: Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, Second Series, 1999, Gale (Detroit, MI).
Drabble, Margaret, editor, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th edition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000.
Drama Criticism, Volume 5, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.
Drama for Students, Volume 14, Greg Barnhisel, “Critical Essay on Curse of the Starving Class,” Gale (Detroit, MI), 2002.
Earl Blackwell’s Celebrity Register 1990, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990.
Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.
Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Volume 4, St. James (Detroit, MI), 1999.
Graham, Laura, Sam Shepard: Theme, Image, and the Director, Lang (New York, NY), 1995.
Greasley, Philip, editor, Dictionary of Midwestern Literature, Volume 1: The Authors, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 2001.
Hart, James D., editor, The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 6th edition, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1995.
International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 3: Actors and Actresses, St. James (Detroit, MI), 1996.
International Dictionary of Theatre, Volume 2: Playwrights, St. James (Detroit, MI), 1993.
Magill, Frank N., editor, Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Volume 5, Marshall Cavendish (New York, NY), 1991.
Magill, Frank N., editor, Critical Survey of Drama, revised edition, Volume 6, Salem Press (Pasadena, CA), 1994.
Magill, Frank N., editor, Cyclopedia of World Authors, 3rd edition, Volume 5, Salem Press (Pasadena, CA), 1997.
Marranca, Bonnie, editor, American Dramas: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, Performing Arts Journal Publications (New York, NY), 1981.
Mottram, Ron, Inner Landscapes: The Theater of Sam Shepard, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1984.
Newsmakers 1996, Issue 4, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1996.
New York Times Theatre Reviews, New York Times Company (New York, NY), 1971.
Oumano, Ellen, Sam Shepard: The Life and Work of an American Dreamer, St. Martin’s Press (New York, NY), 1986.
Parker, Peter, editor, A Reader’s Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.
Patraka, Vivian M., and Siegel, Mark, Sam Shepard, Boise State University (Boise, ID), 1985.
Peck, David, editor, Identities and Issues in Literature, Volume 3, Salem Press (Pasadena, CA), 1997.
Riggs, Thomas, editor, Reference Guide to American Literature, 4th edition, St. James (Detroit, MI), 2000.
St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, St. James (Detroit, MI), 2000.
Schlueter, Paul and June, editors, Modern American Literature, Volume 5, second supplement to the 4th edition, A Library of Literary Criticism, Continuum (New York, NY), 1985.
Serafin, Steven R., editor, Encyclopedia of American Literature, Continuum (New York, NY), 1999.
Shepard, Sam, Five Plays by Sam Shepard, Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1967.
Shepard, Sam, Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays, Winter House, 1972.
Shepard, Sam, Seven Plays by Sam Shepard, Bantam (New York, NY), 1981.
Shewey, Don, Sam Shepard, Dell (New York, NY), 1985.
Trussler, Simon, File on Shepard, Methuen (London, England), 1989.
Tucker, Martin, editor, Modern American Literature, Volume 6, supplement to the 4th edition, A Library of Literary Criticism, Continuum (New York, NY), 1985.
Wallflower Critical Guide to Contemporary North American Directors, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 2001.
Weales, Gerald, The Jumping-Off Place: American Drama in the 1960’s, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1969.
PERIODICALS
American Theatre, October, 2000, “Alma Pater,” p. 40; November, 2002, Frank J. Baldaro, review of Great Dream of Heaven: Stories, p. 81.
Back Stage, May 3, 1996, Daniel Sheward, review of Buried Child, p. 48; May 16, 1997, Peter Shaughnessy, review of Curse of the Starving Class, p. 64; March 24, 2000, Eric Grode, review of True West, p. 64; October 26, 2001, David Sheward, review of The Late Henry Moss, p. 56.
Back Stage East, July 17, 2008, Adam R. Perlman, review of Kicking a Dead Horse, p. 11.
Back Stage West, September 28, 2000, Kristina Mannion, review of Simpatico, p. 18; January 18, 2001, Michael Green, review of Fool for Love, p. 14; September 28, 2000, Kristina Mannion, review of Simpatico, p. 18; May 3, 2001, Jesse Dienstag, review of Seduced, p. 14; October 26, 2001, David Sheward, review of The Late Henry Moss, p. 56.
Booklist, April 15, 1996, Donna Seaman, review of Cruising Paradise: Tales, p. 1422; September 1, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of Great Dream of Heaven, p. 61; December 1, 2009, Donna Seaman, review of Day out of Days: Stories, p. 22; February 1, 2017, Donna Seaman, review of The One Inside, p. 20.
Books, December, 1997, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 20.
Critical Quarterly, spring, 1982, Richard L. Homan, review of The Tooth of Crime.
Daily News (New York, NY), May 27, 1983, Douglas Watt, review of Fool for Love.
Daily Variety, November 17, 2004, David Rooney, review of The God of Hell, p. 8; January 25, 2005, Marilyn Stasio, review of The Late Henry Moss, p. 10; May 23, 2005, Todd McCarthy, review of Don’t Come Knocking, p. 6; March 19, 2007, Karen Fricker, review of Kicking a Dead Horse, p. 8; July 15, 2008, Marilyn Stasio, review of Kicking a Dead Horse, p. 2.
Entertainment Weekly, May 31, 1996, Margot Mifflin, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 54.
Europe Intelligence Wire, October 27, 2005, Steven Rea, review of The God of Hell.
Film Journal International, April, 2006, Chris Barsanti, review of Don’t Come Knocking, p. 134.
Guardian (London, England), August 1, 2017, Ryan Gilbey, author obituary.
Hollywood Reporter, August 12, 2002, Barry Garron, review of True West, pp. 33-34; November 17, 2004, Alexis Greene, review of The God of Hell, p. 72; May 20, 2005, Kirk Honeycutt, review of Don’t Come Knocking, p. 15; June 30, 2006, Jay Reiner, review of The God of Hell, p. 11; July 31, 2017, Duane Byrge and Hilary Lewis, “Sam Shepard, Esteemed Playwright and Actor, Dies at 73.”
Journal of Popular Culture, spring, 1974, George Stambolian, author profile.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 1996, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 403; August 1, 2002, review of Great Dream of Heaven, p. 1071; December 1, 2009, review of Day out of Days; February 1, 2017, review of The One Inside.
Kliatt, March, 2004, Nola Theiss, review of Great Dream of Heaven, p. 28.
Library Journal, June 15, 1996, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 95, reviews of Simpatico and The Unseen Hand and Other Plays, p. 97; September 15, 2004, Michael Rogers, review of Rolling Thunder Logbook, p. 91; January, 2010, Jim Coan, review of Day out of Days, p. 98; March 1, 2017, James Coan, review of The One Inside, p. 79.
Los Angeles Times, January 31, 2010, Susan Salter Reynolds, review of Day out of Days; August 1, 2017, Randall Roberts, “Sam Shepard: Pulitzer Prize-winning Playwright, Actor and … Avant-garde Drummer?”
Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 28, 1996, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 6.
Maclean’s, October 2, 2000, “Actor, Playwright, Cowboy,” p. 74.
Massachusetts Review, autumn, 1967, David Madden, author profile.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, October 25, 2002, Jim Higgins, review of Great Dream of Heaven.
National Review, April 13, 1992, John Simon, review of Voyager, p. 55.
New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann, review of Far North, pp. 22-23.
New Statesman, July 23, 2001, Katherine Duncan-Jones, “A Little Legend about Love,” review of A Lie of the Mind, p. 45.
Newsweek, March 23, 1970, Jack Kroll, review of Operation Sidewinder.
New York Review of Books, May 9, 1985, Robert Mazzocco, review of The Tooth of Crime.
New York Times, May 17, 1996, review of Cruising Paradise, p. B12; June 16, 1996, review of Buried Child, p. H5; July 15, 2008, “Horse Can’t Head into the Sunset in Sam Shepard’s New West,” p. 1; July 31, 2017, Ben Brantley, “Sam Shepard, Actor and Pulitzer-Winning Playwright, Is Dead at 73.”
New York Times Book Review, June 23, 1996, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 23; September 7, 1997, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 40.
People, November 14, 1988, Peter Travers, review of Far North, p. 24.
Publishers Weekly, April 1, 1996, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 38; April 15, 1996, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 48; September 9, 2002, review of Great Dream of Heaven, pp. 40-41; November 30, 2009, review of Day out of Days, p. 30.
Spectator, November 16, 1996, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 51.
Time, November 7, 1988, Richard Corliss, review of Far North, pp. 108-109; May 20, 1996, Richard Zoglin, review of Buried Child, p. 77.
Times Literary Supplement, November 22, 1996, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 22.
Variety, May 5, 1997, Robert L. Daniels, review of Curse of the Starving Class, p. 213; February 16, 1998, Greg Evans, review of Eyes for Consuela, p. 68; July 16, 2001, Matt Wolf, review of A Lie of the Mind, p 25; October 1, 2001, Charles Isherwood, review of The Late Henry Moss, p. 44; November 22, 2004, David Rooney, review of The God of Hell, p. 56; July 21, 2008, Marilyn Stasio, review of Kicking a Dead Horse, p. 28.
Video Business, July 31, 2006, Ed Grant, review of Don’t Come Knocking, p. 14.
Washington Post Book World, January 25, 2017, Ron Charles, “Sam Shepard Scatters a Few Off-script Gems across a New Terrain.”
Women’s Wear Daily, March 13, 1970, Martin Gottfried, review of Operation Sidewinder.
World Literature Today, winter, 1997, review of Cruising Paradise, p. 152.
ONLINE
Moonstruck Drama Bookstore Website, http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/ (March 5, 2003), biography of Sam Shepard.
Pegasos, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ (March 5, 2003), biography of Sam Shepard.
Sam Shepard Website, http://www.sam-shepard.com/ (September 18, 2017), author profile.
Thespian Net, http://www.thespiannet.com/ (March 5, 2003), biography of Sam Shepard.*
Novels
The One Inside (2017)
Collections
Great Dream of Heaven (2002)
4 Two Act Plays (2009)
Chicago And Other Plays (2009)
The Late Henry Moss, Eyes for Consuela, When the World Was Green: Three Plays (2009)
The Unseen Hand: And Other Plays (2009)
Day Out of Days (2009)
Cruising Paradise (2010)
Plays
True West (1981)
Kicking a Dead Horse (2007)
When the World Was Green (2007) (with Joseph Chaiken)
Fool for Love (2008)
Buried Child (2009)
Simpatico (2009)
The God of Hell (2010)
Tooth of Crime: Second Dance (2010)
Fifteen One-Act Plays (2012)
Heartless (2013)
Ages of the Moon (2015)
A Particle of Dread (2016)
Novellas
Spencer Tracy Is Not Dead (2016)
Non fiction
The Rolling Thunder Logbook (2010)
Sam Shepard, Esteemed Playwright and Actor, Dies at 73
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He won the Pulitzer Prize for his play, 'Buried Child,' was nominated for an Oscar for his role in 'The Right Stuff' and recently appeared on Netflix's 'Bloodline.'
Sam Shepard, the respected Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist and Oscar-nominated actor, has died. He was 73.
Shepard died Thursday from complications from ALS at his home in Kentucky, according to his spokesman.
“The family requests privacy at this difficult time,” said spokesman Chris Boneau. Funeral arrangements remain private, and plans for a public memorial have not been determined.
Shepard won the Pulitzer in 1979 for his play Buried Child and was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar in 1984 for his role in The Right Stuff as Chuck Yeager. He was in a romantic relationship with Jessica Lange from 1982 to 2009.
In 2015, he appeared on Netflix's dark family drama Bloodline as patriarch Robert Rayburn, which marked his final on-camera appearance.
His first New York plays, Cowboys and The Rock Garden, were produced by Theatre Genesis in 1963.
Read More
Hollywood and Broadway React to Sam Shepard's Death
For his playwriting, Shepard won the Drama Critics' Circle Award and Outer Critics Circle Award in 1986 for his play A Lie of the Mind. He won 11 Obie Awards for the off-Broadway plays La Turista, Forensic and the Navigators and Melodrama Play, The Tooth of Crime, Action, Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child, Fool for Love and the trilogy Chicago, Icarus' Mother and Red Cross.
True West and Fool for Love were both nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Revivals of Buried Child (1996) and True West (2000) were both nominated for Tony awards. His final play, A Particle of Dread, premiered in 2014 at New York's Signature Theatre.
Shepard made his screen acting debut in Bob Dylan's movie Renaldo and Clara. His film acting credits also include Steel Magnolias, playing the husband of the beauty shop owner; Terence Malick's Days of Heaven, for which his movie career took off; Resurrection; Frances; Country; Fool for Love; Crimes of the Heart; Baby Boom; Bright Angel; Defenseless; Hamlet; The Notebook; Black Hawk Down; Don’t Come Knocking; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; Brothers; Safe House; Mud; August: Osage County; Cold in July; Midnight Special; Ithaca; In Dubious Battle; and You Were Never Here.
He wrote the screenplays for Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point; Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, which won the Palme d'Or at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival; and Wenders' Don't Come Knocking. He also directed for film, including 1988's Far North and 1992's Silent Tongue.
Shepard also played drums in a band he formed called The Holy Modal Rounders, who were featured in Easy Rider, and he accompanied Bob Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour.
View Slideshow
SEE MORE: Sam Shepard's Memorable On-Screen Roles (Photos)
Two volumes of his prose and poetry were published, Hawk Moon and Motel Chronicles. His novel, The One Inside, was published in February by Knopf.
Shepard directed his plays at San Francisco's Magic Theater and at the Royal Court in London. He was also active in the University of California, Davis Drama Workshop.
Samuel Shepard Rogers III was born in Illinois on Nov. 5,1943, and grew up in Cody, Wyo., and Duarte, Calif. After a brief try at college, he dropped out to join a theater troupe. He began writing plays when pursuing an acting career in New York. Cowboys was based on his roommate and himself. His Western persona — jeans, boot, Western shirt — bespoke his upbringing.
Shepard taught playwriting, leading classes and seminars at workshops and universities, including a turn as a Regents Professor at UC Davis.
He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986 and received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy in 1992. In 1994, Shepard was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame. In 2009, he received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a master American dramatist.
In 1999, Shepard received Emmy and Golden Globe Award nominations for his performance in Dash and Lilly.
He is survived by his children, Jesse, Hannah and Walker Shepard; and his sisters, Sandy and Roxanne Rogers.
Today in Entertainment: Twitter has a field day over Anthony Scaramucci's exit; Celebrities mourn the loss of Sam Shepard
Aug. 1, 2017, 6:20 p.m.
Here's what's new and interesting in entertainment and the arts:
Anthony Scaramucci is out and Twitter is having a field day
Goodbye, MTV Moonman trophy. Hello, 'Moon Person'
Sam Shepard: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor and ... avant-garde drummer?
Lady Gaga subpoenaed in producer Dr. Luke's lawsuit against pop singer Kesha
'Ride on, genius': Celebrities mourn the loss of Sam Shepard
ArtsMoviesMusic
July 31, 2017, 10:28 a.m.
Sam Shepard: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor and ... avant-garde drummer?
Randall Roberts
Sam Shepard in 2014. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
Sam Shepard, whose death at 73 was announced on Monday, will be remembered for his cross-discipline versatility. As a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, he penned classic off-Broadway plays including "True West," "Buried Child" and "Fool for Love."
An Oscar-nominated actor, he starred in films including "Days of Heaven," "The Right Stuff," "Crimes of the Heart" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."
To fans of underground music, however, Shepard served a lesser-known role as the drummer for seminal New York avant-garde folk band the Holy Modal Rounders, with whom he performed on the crucial late 1960s albums "Indian War Whoop" and "The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders."
The band is best known for its song "If You Want to Be a Bird," which plays during the classic scene in "Easy Rider" in which Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson roar down the highway on their motorcycles. That's Shepard playing drums as Rounders founders Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber whoop and yowl.
It was in his capacity as a percussionist, in fact, that he drew the attention of a young Patti Smith, who, in her 2010 memoir "Just Kids," recounted their first early '70s meeting at seminal music club the Village Gate.
Escorted to the club by Todd Rundgren, who had just issued his album "Runt," Smith described the Holy Modal Rounders' set as "like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies. I was fixed on the drummer, who seemed as if he was on the lam and had slid behind the drums while cops looked elsewhere."
Smith, who at the time was freelancing for Crawdaddy magazine, introduced herself to this drummer, who said his name was Slim Shadow.
The two started hanging out, wrote Smith, describing his tales as being "even taller than mine. He had an infectious laugh and was rugged, smart, and intuitive. In my mind, he was the fellow with the cowboy mouth."
Only later did she learn Slim's real identity when a friend pulled her aside after seeing them at a restaurant together. As recounted in "Just Kids," Smith wrote that her friend asked, "What are you doing with Sam Shepard?"
"Sam Shepard?" I said. "Oh, no, this guy's name is Slim."
"Honey, don't you know who he is?"
"He's the drummer for the Holy Modal Rounders."
No, corrected her friend, "He's the biggest playwright off-Broadway. He had a play at Lincoln Center. He won five Obies!"
Once she learned of his reputation and acclaim, Smith and Shepard continued to see each other -- despite his being married at the time -- and eventually collaborated on a play called "Cowboy Mouth."
Smith described telling him of nervousness at writing for the stage, which she had never done. But Shepard urged her on, Smith wrote, telling her that "you can't make a mistake when you improvise."
Replied Smith: "What if I screw up the rhythm?"
"You can't," Shepard explained. "It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another."
7:15 a.m. Updated to correct the title of Smith's memoir, "Just Kids," and to identify the Holy Modal Rounders' co-founders, Stampfel and Weber.
ABOUT SAM
Films about Sam
This So-Called Disaster
Shepard & Dark - More info
Children
Son Jesse Mojo Shepard - born May 1970 - More info
Daughter Hannah Jane Shepard - born January 13, 1986 - More info
Son Samuel 'Walker' Shepard - born June 14, 1987 - More info
Homes
Sante Fe, New Mexico: 1983-1986
Charlottesville, Virginia: 1986-1995
Stillwater, Minnesota: 1995-2004 - More info
One Fifth Avenue, Greenwich Village: 2005-2010
Midway, Kentucky (Horse farm)
Sante Fe, New Mexico
BIOGRAPHY
Sam Shepard ranks as one of America's most celebrated dramatists. He has written nearly 50 plays and has seen his work produced across the nation, in venues ranging from Greenwich Village coffee shops to regional professional and community theatres, from college campuses to commercial Broadway houses. His plays are regularly anthologized, and theatre professors teach Sam Shepard as a canonical American author. Outside of his stage work, he has achieved fame as an actor, writer, and director in the film industry. With a career that now spans nearly 40 years, Sam Shepard has gained the critical regard, media attention, and iconic status enjoyed by only a rare few in American theatre. Throughout his career Shepard has amassed numerous grants, prizes, fellowships, and awards, including the Cannes Palme d'Or and the Pulitzer Prize. He has received abundant popular praise and critical adulation. While the assessment of Shepard's standing may evidence occasional hyperbole, there can be little doubt that he has spoken in a compelling way to American theatre audiences, and that his plays have found deep resonance in the nation's cultural imagination.
Samuel Shepard Rogers IV was born on November 5, 1943 in Fort Sheridan, Illinois. In the early years, Sam, the eldest of three children, led a rather nomadic life living on several military bases. His father was an army officer and former Air Force bomber during World War II while his mother was a teacher. His childhood experience of living in a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father would often provide the recurrent dark themes in his writing as well as a preoccupation with the myth of the vanishing West. His writing commonly incorporated inventive language, symbolism, and non-linear storytelling while being populated with drifters, fading rock stars and others living on the edge.
The family finally settled in Duarte, CA where Sam graduated from high school in 1961. In his high school years he began acting and writing poetry. He also worked as a stable hand at a horse ranch in Chino from 1958-1960. Thinking he might become a veterinarian, Sam studied agriculture at Mount Antonio Junior College for a year; but when a traveling theater group, the Bishop's Company Repertory Players came through town, Sam joined up and left home. After touring with them during 1962-1963, he moved to New York City and worked as a bus boy at the Village Gate in Greenwich Village.
Sam began focusing his efforts on writing a series of of avant-garde one-act plays and eventually found his way to the off-off-Broadway scene to Theatre Genesis, a ragtag group that met in an upstairs room at St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. There he had his first two plays produced on a double bill - "Cowboys" (1964) and "The Rock Garden" (1964). After the University of Minnesota offered him a grant in 1966, he won OBIE Awards for "Chicago," "Icarus' Mother" and "Red Cross" - an unprecedented feat to win three in the same year. In 1967, Sam wrote his first full-length play, "La Turista," an allegory on the Vietnam War about two American tourists in Mexico, and was honored again with his fourth OBIE.
After receiving an OBIE for "Melodrama Play" (1968) and "Cowboys #2" (1968), Sam received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation. He put his music skills taught to him by his father to use by playing drums and guitar in the rock band, the Holy Modal Rounders, in which he played for the next few years while continuing to write plays. In 1969 he married O-lan Jones Dark and together they had a son, Jesse Mojo Shepard. At this time, Sam made tentative steps toward screenwriting, having his first teleplay, "Fourteen Hundred Thousand" (NET, 1969), broadcast on television. He got a taste of Hollywood when he was one of several screenwriters on Michelangelo Antonioni's "Zabriskie Point" (1970). In 1971, after a high-profile relationship with singer-poet Patti Smith - despite being married to actress O-Lan Jones Dark - Sam and his family moved to London, where he spent three years writing more plays, including "The Tooth of the Crime" (1972). The play crossed the Atlantic for a U.S. production in 1973, winning the young playwright yet another OBIE.
In 1974, Sam returned to the United States, where he was set up as the playwright in residence at the Magic Theater in San Francisco, a post he held for the next ten years. Meanwhile, he joined Bob Dylan's "Rolling Thunder Revue," the singer-songwriter's traveling band of musicians who covered the northern hemisphere in the mid-1970s. He was originally hired to write a movie about the tour, but instead produced a book later on called "The Rolling Thunder Logbook". He then entered the cinema world with the lead role in Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven" (1978), which served to raise his profile. It was a lucky stroke. The screenplay was written by Rudolph Wurlitzer, who was also on Dylan's tour. Despite his branching out into other avenues, playwriting remained Sam's stock and trade.
Returning to the theater, Sam wrote some of his finest work, including several plays that later proved to be his most famous and revered. He produced the first two of a series of plays about families tearing themselves apart, which debuted off-Broadway. "Curse of the Starving Class" debuted off-Broadway in 1978 followed by "Buried Child" the same year. Though both plays added to his OBIE collection, "Buried Child" earned the playwright the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979. He also began his collaboration with actor-writer-director Joseph Chaikin of the Open Theater, with both contributing to "Tongues" (1978) and "Savage/Love" (1979).
For the next installment of his family tragedy series that he started with "Curse of the Starving Glass," Sam wrote "True West" (1980), using a more traditional narrative to depict a rivalry between two estranged brothers. First performed at the Magic Theater in San Francisco, "True West" was revived on numerous occasions and starred several high-profile actors over the years, including Gary Sinese, John Malkovich, Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly. Meanwhile, thanks to his performance in "Days of Heaven," Sam began landing other roles in features with greater regularity. Tall, lanky and brooding, his weathered good looks served him well on screen. In 1980 he co-starred with Ellen Burstyn in "Resurrection" followed by a very small role in "Raggedy Man" a year later and then a more substantial role in the biopic "Frances" (1982). That would prove to be an important film on a personal note because it introduced him to his future companion, Jessica Lange. Two years later, he ended his marriage with O-lan Jones.
Despite being involved in theater for almost two decades at this point, Sam had shied away from directing anything he wrote. That changed with "Fool for Love" (1983), which depicted a pair of quarreling lovers at a Mojave Desert motel and earned him his 11th overall OBIE award, but his first for Best Direction. He next landed perhaps his most widely recognized film role, playing Chuck Yeager in the epic drama about the birth of America's space program, "The Right Stuff" (1983). This would earn him an Academy Award nominiation. His restrained and minimalist performance - which mirrored the real life Yeager - was hailed by critics and audiences, including the man he portrayed on film. After starring opposite Jessica in the rural drama, "Country" (1984), Sam took his prose collection - "Motel Chronicles" - and incorporated it a screenplay for Wim Wenders' "Paris, Texas" (1984), which won the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. He next adapted his own play, "Fool for Love" (1985), for director Robert Altman, in which he also took the leading role of Eddie.
Sam made another triumphant return to the stage as writer and director with "A Lie of the Mind" (1986), a gritty three-act play about two families suffering the consequences of severe spousal abuse. It was first staged off-Broadway at the Promenade Theater. Once again, the playwright earned several awards and accolades, including a Drama Desk Award and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best New Play. As his career progressed, Sam began exploring other avenues of creative expression with more frequency, which left less time to focus on the theater. While early in his career he had at least one play - if not several - released just about every year, he began writing fewer plays by the late 1980s. After producing the lesser-known "A Short Life of Trouble" (1987), he co-starred in Beth Henley's quirky drama "Crimes of the Heart" (1986) with Diane Keaton and again with the Oscar-winning actress in the romantic comedy "Baby Boom" (1987). Sam then made his feature directorial debut with "Far North" (1988) starring his long-time companion.
In 1989 he took on a small, but very noticeable role in the successful comedy-drama, "Steel Magnolias" about six Southern belles with backbones as tough as nails. After writing the blackmail drama "Simpatico" (1993) for the stage, he made a return behind the camera for the metaphysical Western-cum-Greek tragedy, "Silent Tongue" (1994). After his induction into the Theater Hall of Fame in 1994, he reunited with Chaikin for "When the World Was Green" (1996), a play commissioned for the Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta and reprised for the Signature Theater Company's 1996-97 season that showcased several of his plays. In 1996 his restaging of "Buried Child" on Broadway with direction by Gary Sinese earned a Tony Award nomination. Meanwhile, he published "Cruising Paradise: Tales" (1997), a collection of 40 short stories that explored the themes of solitude and loss.
As the new millennium approached, Sam found himself in demand more as an actor, which gave him greater exposure to audiences, but unfortunately also limited his stage output for a spell. Through the 90s, he appeared in about fourteen films, some television productions, including three westerns - "The Good Old Boys" and "Streets of Laredo" in 1995 and then "Purgatory" in 1999. A&E's biopic, "Dash and Lilly" was well received the same year. He began the decade with Volker Schlöndorff's "Voyager" (aka Homo Faber), in which he gave an impressive performance opposite Julie Delpy. That was followed by three mediocre films, "Bright Angel" and "Defenseless" in 1991 and then "Thunderheart" with Val Kilmer in 1992. During the next two years he co-starred in two substantial mainsteam films - "Pelican Brief" (1993) in the role of Julia Roberts' lover and "Safe Passage (1994) as Susan Sarandon's husband. In 1997 he was back on screen in the romantic drama, "The Only Thrill", co-starring for the third time with Diane Keaton.
Following a role in "Snow Falling on Cedars" (1999) and a screen adaptation of "Simpatico" (1999), Sam played the Ghost of Hamlet's father in the contemporary adaptation of "Hamlet" (2000), which he followed with a supporting role in "All the Pretty Horses" (2000). Returning to playwriting, Sam then wrote "The Late Henry Moss" (2001), which debuted at the Magic Theater. Continuing to act more than write, he was seen in numerous onscreen projects, including the exciting war film, "Black Hawk Down" (2001), "Swordfish" (2001) and "The Pledge" (2001) starring Jack Nicholson.
As time wore on and the world became more darkly complex, Sam's writing started becoming more political as a reflection of the times. With "The God of Hell" (2004), the playwright sought to tackle what he deemed "Republican fascism". On the big screen he had a small role in "The Notebook" (2004). Remarkably, he returned to performing on stage for the second time in his career ("Cowboy Mouth" being the first in 1971) and co-starred with Dallas Roberts in the Caryl Churchill cloning drama, "A Number", which opened Off-Broadway in November 2004.
It was time to team up once more with Wim Wenders as scriptwriter and lead actor for "Don't Come Knocking" (2005) in which Jessica plays his old girlfriend. He was then cast as the commander of a top secret Navy squadron in "Stealth" (2005), followed by a supporting role in the Mexican Western, "Bandidas" (2006) opposite Penelope Cruz and Selma Hajek. After narrating the endearing "Charlotte's Web" (2006), Sam earned a SAG nomination for his performance in "Ruffian" (ABC, 2007). The same year he played Frank James in the brooding and beautiful film, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford".
Then it was back to the theater scene with two plays written for Irish actor Stephen Rea - "Kicking a Dead Horse" (2007) and "Ages of the Moon" (2009). Both premiered at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and were then transported across the Atlantic to off-off Broadway. Three smaller films followed with a perfect role in Jim Sheridan's "Brothers" (2009) in which he gives a fine portrayal of a taciturn military father.
2010 began with the publication of Sam's collection of short stories, "Day out of Days". For onscreen productions, he had the lead role in Mateo Gil's film, "Blackthorn", in which he played Butch Cassidy.
The following year brought the end of his long-time relationship with actress Jessica Lange with whom he had two children. He began spending more time in New Mexico with an internship at the Sante Fe Institute. On the big screen, his biggest role in 2011 was playing a CIA agent in "Safe House" with Denzel Washington.
In March 2012, Sam shared the stage with Patti Smith at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. When summer rolled around, he headed to New York City where his new play, "Heartless" premiered at the Signature Theatre. In the fall a documentary called, "Shepard & Dark", directed by Treva Wurmfeld, entered the film festival circuit.
Three major films premiered in 2013 - the Huckleberry Finnish "Mud" with Matthew McConaughey, the gritty Jeff Nichols' thriller, "Out of the Furnace" and the Tracy Letts dysfunctional stage-to- screen drama, "August: Osage County". In June the Wittliff Collections at Texas State opened a new literary exhibition to showcase the Shepard archives. Called "The Writer’s Road: Selections from the Sam Shepard Papers", the exhibition was slated to run through February 2014. A book was also published by Texas State in conjunction with the exhibit called "Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark". Sam spent most of November in Ireland preparing for his new play, "A Particle of Dread", which premiered at the Londonderry: City of Culture festival.
Discovery Channel's "Klondike" mini-series debuted in January 2014 followed by Sam's appearance at the Sundance Film Festival to promote the Jim Mickle indie film, "Cold in July". The following year he took on another television role as the patriarch of the Chandler family in the Netflix series "Bloodline". In 2016 he appeared in another Jeff Nichols film, "Midnight Special" and also pleased Meg Ryan by starring in her directorial debut "Ithaca".
In February of 2017 he published his last book, "The One Inside", a collection of vignettes, surrealism, short story and thinly veiled memoir.
On July 27, 2017 Sam Shepard passed away at age 73 on his farm in Midway, Kentucky. He died of complications of ALS, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Sam Shepard
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For other people with similar names, see Sam Shepard (disambiguation).
Sam Shepard
Shepard in 2004
Born
Samuel Shepard Rogers III
November 5, 1943
Fort Sheridan, Illinois, U.S.
Died
July 27, 2017 (aged 73)
Midway, Kentucky, U.S.
Cause of death
Complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
Occupation
Playwrightactorauthorscreenwriterdirector
Years active
1962–2017
Spouse(s)
O-Lan Jones (m. 1969; div. 1984)
Partner(s)
Jessica Lange (c. 1982; sep. 2009)
Children
3
Website
www.sam-shepard.com
Signature
Samuel Shepard Rogers III[1] (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017), known professionally as Sam Shepard, was an American playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director whose body of work spanned half a century. He won 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing, the most given to any writer or director. He wrote 44 plays as well as several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs. Shepard received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983). Shepard received the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award as a master American dramatist in 2009. New York magazine described him as "the greatest American playwright of his generation."[2]
Shepard's plays are chiefly known for their bleak, poetic, often surrealist elements, black humor, and rootless characters living on the outskirts of American society.[3] His style evolved over the years, from the absurdism of his early Off-Off-Broadway work to the realism of Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class (both 1978).[4]
Contents [hide]
1
Early life
2
Career
2.1
Writing
2.2
Acting
2.3
Directing
3
Personal life
3.1
Death
4
Archives
5
Bibliography
6
Filmography
7
Awards and nominations
8
See also
9
References
10
Further reading
11
External links
Early life[edit]
Shepard was born on November 5, 1943, in Fort Sheridan, Illinois.[5] He was named Samuel Shepard Rogers III after his father, Samuel Shepard Rogers, Jr., but his nickname was "Steve Rogers".[6] His father was a teacher and farmer who served in the United States Army Air Forces as a bomber pilot during World War II; Shepard characterized him as "a drinking man, a dedicated alcoholic".[7] His mother, Jane Elaine (née Schook), was a teacher and a native of Chicago.[8]
Shepard worked on a ranch as a teenager. After graduating from Duarte High School in Duarte, California in 1961, he briefly studied animal husbandry[7] at nearby Mt. San Antonio College, where he became enamored of Samuel Beckett, jazz, and abstract expressionism. Shepard soon dropped out to join a touring repertory group, the Bishop's Company.
Career[edit]
Writing[edit]
Shepard at age 21
After securing a position as a busboy at the Village Gate nightclub upon arriving in New York City, Shepard became involved in the Off-Off-Broadway theater scene in 1962 through Ralph Cook, the club's head waiter. At this time Samuel "Steve" Rogers adopted the professional name Sam Shepard.[6] Although his plays would go on to be staged at several Off-Off-Broadway venues, he was most closely connected with Cook's Theatre Genesis, housed at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in Manhattan's East Village.[9] Most of his initial writing was for the stage;[10] however, after winning six Obie Awards between 1966 and 1968, Shepard emerged as a viable screenwriter with Robert Frank's Me and My Brother (1968) and Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970). Several of Shepard's early plays, including Red Cross (1966) and La Turista (1967), were directed by Jacques Levy. A habitué of the Chelsea Hotel scene of the era, Shepard also contributed to Kenneth Tynan's ribald Oh! Calcutta! (1969) and drummed sporadically from 1967 through 1971 with the psychedelic folk band The Holy Modal Rounders, appearing on their albums Indian War Whoop (1967) and The Moray Eels Eat The Holy Modal Rounders (1968).
Shepard's early science fiction play The Unseen Hand (1969) would influence Richard O'Brien's stage musical The Rocky Horror Show. Shepard's Cowboy Mouth — a collaboration with his then-lover Patti Smith — was staged at The American Place Theatre in April 1971, providing early exposure for the future punk rock singer. The story and characters were loosely inspired by their relationship, and after opening night, he abandoned the production and fled to New England without a word to anyone involved.[11] He wrote plays out of his house and served for a semester as Regents' Professor of Drama at the University of California, Davis. Shepard accompanied Bob Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975 as the ostensible screenwriter of the surrealist Renaldo and Clara (1978) that emerged from the tour; because much of the film was improvised, Shepard's services were seldom used. His diary of the tour, Rolling Thunder Logbook, was published in 1978. A decade later, Dylan and Shepard co-wrote the 11-minute "Brownsville Girl", included on Dylan's Knocked Out Loaded album (1986) and later compilations.
In 1975, Shepard was named playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre, where he created many of his notable works, including his Family Trilogy. One of the plays in the trilogy, Buried Child (1978), won the Pulitzer Prize, and was nominated for five Tony Awards.[12] It also marked a major turning point in his career, heralding some of his best-known work, including True West (1980), Fool for Love (1983), and A Lie of the Mind (1985). A darkly comic tale of abortive reunion, in which a young man drops in on his grandfather's Illinois farmstead only to be greeted with devastating indifference by his relations, Buried Child saw Shepard stake a claim to the psychological terrain of classic American theater. Curse of the Starving Class (1978) and True West (1980), the other two plays of the trilogy, received their premier productions. Shepard was nominated for Pulitzer prizes for Fool for Love and True West.[13][14] Some critics have expanded this trio to a quintet, incorporating Fool for Love (1983) and A Lie of the Mind (1985). Shepard won a record-setting 10 Obie Awards for writing and directing between 1966 and 1984.
In 2010, a revival of A Lie of the Mind was staged in New York at the same time as Shepard's new play Ages of the Moon opened there.[15] Reflecting on the two plays, Shepard said that, to him, the older play felt "awkward", adding, "All of the characters are in a fractured place, broken into pieces, and the pieces don't really fit together," while the newer play "is like a Porsche. It's sleek, it does exactly what you want it to do, and it can speed up but also shows off great brakes."[16] The revival and new play also coincided with the publication of Shepard's collection Day out of Days: Stories (the title echoes a filmmaking term).[17] The book includes "short stories, poems and narrative sketches... that developed from dozens of leather-bound notebooks [Shepard] carried with him over the years."[16]
Acting[edit]
Shepard began his acting career in earnest when cast in a major role as the land baron in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), opposite Richard Gere and Brooke Adams.[13] This led to other important film roles, including that of Cal, Ellen Burstyn's character's love interest in Resurrection (1980), and, most notably, Shepard's portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983). The latter performance earned Shepard an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. By 1986, his play Fool for Love was getting a film adaptation directed by Robert Altman, with Shepard in the lead role; his play A Lie of the Mind was being performed Off-Broadway with an all-star cast (including Harvey Keitel and Geraldine Page); and Shepard was subsequently working steadily as a film actor. These achievements, together, put him on the cover of Newsweek.
Over the years, Shepard taught extensively on play-writing and other aspects of theater. He gave classes and seminars at various theater workshops, festivals, and universities. Shepard was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1986, and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986.[18] In 2000, Shepard decided to repay a debt of gratitude to the Magic Theatre by staging his play The Late Henry Moss as a benefit in San Francisco. The cast included Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, and Cheech Marin. The limited, three-month run was sold out. In 2001, Shepard played General William F. Garrison in the box office hit Black Hawk Down. Although he was cast only in a supporting role, Shepard enjoyed renewed interest in his talent for screen acting.
Shepard performed Spalding Gray's final monologue, Life Interrupted, for the audiobook version, released in 2006. In 2007, Shepard contributed banjo to Patti Smith's cover of Nirvana's song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on her album Twelve. Although many artists had an influence on Shepard's work, one of the most significant was actor-director Joseph Chaikin, a veteran of The Living Theatre and founder of a group called the Open Theatre.[19] The two often worked together on various projects, and Shepard acknowledged that Chaikin was a valuable mentor.
In 2011, Shepard starred in the film Blackthorn. Shepard's most recent movie appearance is Never Here; it premiered in June 2017 but had been filmed in the fall of 2014.[20][21]
Directing[edit]
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At the beginning of his playwriting career, Shepard did not direct his own plays. His earliest plays had a number of different directors, but were most frequently directed by Ralph Cook, the founder of Theatre Genesis. Later, while living at the Flying Y Ranch in Mill Valley, just north of San Francisco, Shepard formed a successful playwright-director relationship with Robert Woodruff, who directed the premiere of Buried Child (1982), among other plays. During the 1970s, though, Shepard decided that his vision of his plays required him to direct them himself. He consequently directed many of his own plays from that point on; with only a few exceptions, he did not direct plays by other playwrights. He also directed two films, but reportedly did not see film directing as a major interest.
Personal life[edit]
When Shepard first arrived in New York City, he roomed with Charlie Mingus, Jr., a friend from his high school days and the son of jazz musician Charles Mingus. He then lived with actress Joyce Aaron. From 1969 to 1984, he was married to actress O-Lan Jones, with whom he had one son, Jesse Mojo Shepard (born 1970). From 1970 to 1971, Shepard was involved in an extramarital affair with musician Patti Smith, who remained unaware of Shepard's identity as a multiple Obie Award-winning playwright until it was divulged to her by Jackie Curtis. According to Smith, "Me and his wife still even liked each other. I mean, it wasn't like committing adultery in the suburbs or something."[22] After ending his relationship with Smith, Shepard relocated with his wife and son to London in the early 1970s. Returning to the U.S. in 1975, he moved to the 20-acre Flying Y Ranch in Mill Valley, California, where he raised a young colt named Drum and used to ride double with his young son on an appaloosa named Cody.[citation needed]
Shepard met Academy Award-winning actress Jessica Lange on the set of the film Frances, in which they were both acting. He moved in with her in 1983, and they were together for nearly 30 years; they separated in 2009.[23] They had two children, Hannah Jane (born 1985) and Samuel Walker Shepard (born 1987). In 2003, his elder son, Jesse, wrote a book of short stories that was published in San Francisco; Shepard appeared with him at a reading to introduce the book.[24]
Despite having a longstanding aversion to flying, Shepard allowed the real Chuck Yeager to take him up in a jet plane in 1982, while preparing to play the test pilot in The Right Stuff.[25][26] Shepard described his fear of flying as a source for a character in his 1966 play Icarus's Mother.[27] He went through an airliner crash in the film Voyager, and according to one account, he vowed never to fly again after a very rocky trip on an airliner coming back from Mexico in the 1960s.[28]
In the early morning hours of January 3, 2009, Shepard was arrested and charged with speeding and drunken driving in Normal, Illinois.[29] He pled guilty to both charges on February 11, 2009, and was sentenced to 24 months probation, alcohol education classes, and 100 hours of community service.[30] On May 25, 2015, Shepard was arrested again, this time in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for aggravated drunk driving.[31]
His 50-year friendship with Johnny Dark (stepfather to O-Lan Jones) was the subject of the documentary Shepard & Dark (2013) by Treva Wurmfeld.[32] A collection of Shepard and Dark's correspondence, Two Prospectors,[33] was also published that year.
Death[edit]
Shepard died on July 27, 2017, at his home in Kentucky, aged 73, from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.[5][34] Patti Smith paid homage in The New Yorker to their long collaboration.[35]
Archives[edit]
Sam Shepard's Papers are split between the Wittliff collections of Southwestern Writers, Texas State University, comprising 27 boxes (13 linear feet),[36] and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, comprising 30 document boxes (12.6 linear feet).[37]
Bibliography[edit]
Plays
1964: Cowboys
1964: The Rock Garden
1965: Chicago
1965: Icarus's Mother
1965: 4-H Club
1966: Red Cross
1967: La Turista
1967: Cowboys #2
1967: Forensic & the Navigators
1969: The Unseen Hand
1969: Oh! Calcutta! (contributed sketches)
1970: The Holy Ghostly
1970: Operation Sidewinder
1971: Mad Dog Blues
1971: Back Bog Beast Bait
1971: Cowboy Mouth (with Patti Smith)
1972: The Tooth of Crime
1974: Geography of a Horse Dreamer
1975: Action
1976: Angel City
1976: Suicide in B Flat
1977: Inacoma
1978: Curse of the Starving Class
1978: Buried Child
1978: Tongues (with Joseph Chaikin)
1979: Seduced: a Play in Two Acts
1980: True West
1981: Savage/Love (with Joseph Chaikin)
1983: Fool for Love
1985: A Lie of the Mind
1987: A Short Life of Trouble
1987: The War in Heaven
1991: States of Shock
1993: Simpatico
1996 Tooth of Crime (Second Dance)
1998: Eyes for Consuela
2000: The Late Henry Moss
2004: The God of Hell
2004: The Notebook
2007: Kicking a Dead Horse
2009: Ages of the Moon
2012: Heartless
2014: A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations)
Collections
1973: Hawk Moon, PAJ Books; ISBN 0-933826-23-0
1983: Motel Chronicles, City Lights; ISBN 0-87286-143-0
1984: Seven Plays, Dial Press, 368 pages; ISBN 0-553-34611-3
1984: Fool for Love and Other Plays, Bantam, 320 pages; ISBN 0-553-34590-7
1996: The Unseen Hand: and Other Plays, Vintage, 400 pages; ISBN 0-679-76789-4
1996: Cruising Paradise, Vintage, 255 pages; ISBN 0-679-74217-4
2003: Great Dream of Heaven, Vintage, 160 pages; ISBN 0-375-70452-3
2004: Rolling Thunder Logbook, Da Capo, 176 pages, reissue; ISBN 0-306-81371-8
2004: Day out of Days: Stories, Knopf, 304 pages; ISBN 978-0-307-26540-1
2013: Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark, Texas, 400 pages, ISBN 978-0-292-76196-4
Novel
2017: The One Inside, Knopf, 172 pages, ISBN 978-0-451-49458-0
Sam Shepard, Actor
and Pulitzer-Winning
Playwright, Is Dead at 73
Mr. Shepard, one of the most important and
influential writers of his generation, specialized in
capturing the darker sides of American family life.
By BEN BRANTLEYJULY 31, 2017
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Sam Shepard, whose hallucinatory plays redefined the landscape of the American West and its inhabitants, died on Thursday at his home in Kentucky. He was 73.
A spokesman for his family announced the death on Monday, saying the cause was complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Possessed of a stoically handsome face and a rangy frame, Mr. Shepard became a familiar presence as an actor in films that included “Days of Heaven” (1978), “The Right Stuff” (1983) and “Baby Boom” (1987). He bore a passing resemblance to that laconic idol of Hollywood’s golden era, Gary Cooper, and in an earlier age, Mr. Shepard could have made a career as a leading man of Westerns.
A reluctant movie star who was always suspicious of celebrity’s luster, he was more at home as one of the theater’s most original and prolific portraitists of what was once the American frontier.
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Sam Shepard in Pictures
Sam Shepard in Pictures
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In plays like “True West” (1980), “Fool for Love” (1983) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Buried Child” (1978), he dismantled the classic iconography of cowboys and homesteaders, of American dreams and white picket fences, and reworked the landscape of deserts and farmlands into his own shimmering expanse of surreal estate.
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In Mr. Shepard’s plays, the only undeniable truth is that of the mirage. From early pieces like “Chicago” (1965), written when he was in his early 20s and staged in the margins of Off Off Broadway, to late works like “Heartless” (2012), he presented a world in which nothing is fixed.
That includes any comforting notions of family, home, material success and even individual identity. “To me, a strong sense of self isn’t believing in a lot,” Mr. Shepard said in a 1994 interview with The New York Times. “Some people might define it that way, saying, ‘He has a very strong sense of himself.’ But it’s a complete lie.”
That feeling of uncertainty was translated into dialogue of an uncommon lyricism and some of the strangest, strongest images in American theater. A young man in “Buried Child,” a bruising tale of a Midwestern homecoming, describes looking into the rearview mirror as he is driving and seeing his face morph successively into those of his ancestors.
Mr. Shepard wrote more than 55 plays (his last, “A Particle of Dread,” had its premiere in 2014), acted in more than 50 films and had more than a dozen roles on television. He was also the author of several prose works, including “Cruising Paradise” (1996), and the memoir “Motel Chronicles” (1982). Though he received critical acclaim almost from the beginning of his career, and his work has been staged throughout the world, he was never a mainstream commercial playwright.
Several writers who grew up studying Mr. Shepard’s works said that they were struck by his boldness. Christopher Shinn, whose plays include the Pulitzer finalist “Dying City,” said he was reminded of Mr. Shepard’s gifts as a writer while watching “Buried Child” Off Broadway last year.
“I felt the play pulsing with Sam Shepard’s unconscious, and I realized how rarely I feel that in the theater today,” Mr. Shinn said on Monday. “Sam always wrote from that place — a zone of trauma, mystery and grief. Whether the play was more mainstream or experimental in its conception, he took the big risk every time.”
In the relatively naturalistic “True West,” two brothers of opposite temperaments find themselves assuming the personality of the other. (John Malkovich and Gary Sinise made their names in the Steppenwolf Theater Company production; Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly memorably traded off the parts in the 2000 Broadway revival.) Roles within families depicted onstage continually shift and dissolve, as in Mr. Shepard’s great “A Lie of the Mind” (1985), the title of which might serve for every play he wrote.
As for love between a man and a woman, Mr. Shepard, whose long relationship with the actress Jessica Lange cast an unwanted spotlight on his private life, described that as “terrible and impossible.” He later explained: “It’s impossible the way people enter into it feeling they’re going to be saved by the other one. And it seems like many, many times that quicksand happens in a relationship when you feel that somehow you can be saved.”
That point of view received its fullest and most rousingly theatrical incarnation in “Fool for Love,” a portrait of possibly incestuous bedmates who spend their lives running away from and toward each other as fast as they can. The play received its first Broadway production only two years ago, starring a ferocious Sam Rockwell and Nina Arianda, in roles embodied three decades earlier by Ed Harris and Kathy Baker.
“I loved Sam,” Mr. Harris said in a statement on Monday. “He has been a huge part of my life, who I am, and he will remain so.”
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The dynamic of love in that play, as it is for family in “True West” and “Buried Child,” is the wrestling match. Cast members in Shepard plays are often required to tear down the set, literally (in his early “La Turista,” a young man walked through a wall), and engage in highly physical fights. Bruises, sprains and broken bones are common casualties of appearing in a Shepard production.
But collaborators remembered Mr. Shepard as being easy to work with. “Especially gratifying was the trust he placed in a young director,’’ said Daniel Aukin, who directed “Heartless” in 2012 and “Fool for Love” on Broadway. “For such a meticulous artist he was a million miles from precious. After a rehearsal room run-through of ‘Fool for Love’ I was concerned about a bit of blocking. He said, ‘If they’re in the pocket, they can do it standing on their heads.’ ”
Mr. Aukin said Mr. Shepard told him of his illness before they began working on the production, as he did with at least one other recent collaborator. But the playwright largely kept his battle private. He is survived by his children — Jesse, Hannah and Walker Shepard — and his sisters, Sandy and Roxanne Rogers.
Born Samuel Shepard Rogers III on Nov. 5, 1943, he came naturally by his Strindbergian view of love, marriage and family. The father for whom he was named was an alcoholic, nomadic man, and he haunts Mr. Shepard’s work, in the ghostly form of the cynical, romantic narrator of “Fool for Love” and the title character of “The Late Henry Moss” (2005).
Known as Steve Rogers through his childhood and adolescence, the younger Mr. Shepard grew up on his family’s avocado farm in Duarte, Calif. Jobs in his youth included stablehand, orange picker and sheep shearer. He briefly attended Mount San Antonio College, as an agriculture student, but dropped out to move to New York in 1962, having discovered jazz and the plays of Samuel Beckett.
Mr. Shepard was soon writing plays in which characters and images melted into one another, suggesting a poetically cadenced LSD trip. (Mr. Shepard admitted to free acquaintance with drugs in that phase of his life.) Of that era in downtown Manhattan he has said, “You were right in the thing, especially on the Lower East Side. La MaMa, Theater, Genesis, Caffe Cino, all those theaters were just starting. So that was just a great coincidence. I had place to just go and put something on without having to go through a producer or go through the commercial network.”
His work extended to the music world. He wrote songs with John Cale and Bob Dylan, notably “Brownsville Girl,” from Mr. Dylan’s 1986 album “Knocked Out Loaded,” and he played drums for a time in a group called the Holy Modal Rounders, who once opened for the progressive rock group Pink Floyd. (He also had a well-publicized relationship with the singer-songwriter Patti Smith.)
Besides acting in films, he directed a few, including “Far North” (1988), which he wrote and which starred Ms. Lange. Mr. Shepard wrote or collaborated on screenplays for, among others, the directors Michaelangelo Antonioni (“Zabriskie Point,” 1970), Robert Frank (“Me and My Brother,” 1969) and Wim Wenders (“Paris, Texas,” which won the top prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival).
Another screenwriting collaboration was with Mr. Dylan, for his widely panned, self-referential 1978 film “Renaldo and Clara,” described by one critic as a “four-hour fever dream” about the rock ‘n’ roll life.
Most recently he portrayed the patriarch of a troubled Florida family in the Netflix series “Bloodline.” But the role that may have matched actor and subject most neatly was Chuck Yeager in “The Right Stuff,” Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book about the early days of the space program. It earned Mr. Shepard an Oscar nomination.
“He was playing Yeager, but for the other actors who worked with him, he was Sam,” Mr. Kaufman said in a phone interview on Monday. “He was such a cool guy with as perfect an ear as I’ve ever come across. He could hear and reproduce sounds in a way — I don’t know — that maybe Bob Dylan could do.”
Speaking of how he creates his characters, Mr. Shepard once perfectly summed up the artful ambiguity that pervades his work and is a principal reason it seems likely to endure: “There are these territories inside all of us, like a child or a father or the whole man,” he said, “and that’s what interests me more than anything: where those territories lie.
“I mean, you have these assumptions about somebody and all of a sudden this other thing appears. Where is that coming from?
“That’s the mystery. That’s what’s so fascinating.”
Correction: July 31, 2017
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the occupation of Chuck Yeager, whom Mr. Shepard portrayed in the movie “The Right Stuff.” He was a test pilot, not an aspiring astronaut.
Sam Shepard obituary
Playwright, actor and director who exposed the gap between myth and reality in American life
Sam Shepard forged a genuinely original writing voice; his runaway soliloquies made urgent rhythmic poetry out of the banal. Photograph: Jakub Mosur/Associated Press
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Sam Shepard, who has died aged 73 from complications of ALS, a form of motor neurone disease, excelled as an actor, screenwriter, playwright and director. In each of those disciplines he challenged and reimagined mythic American archetypes. He wrote nearly 50 plays; the most coruscating of them, such as the Pulitzer prize-winning Buried Child (1978), True West (1980) and Fool for Love (1983), established him as one of the visionaries of US theatre and created a fresh vernacular for exploring the disparity in American life between myth and reality, past and present, fathers and sons.
He took flawed macho heroes who might have staggered out of an Anthony Mann western, and broken, overheated families redolent of a Tennessee Williams clan, and forced them into claustrophobic hothouse scenarios; the result was like Beckett performed in cowboy duds. He found in the process a large audience receptive to this blend of stormy psychodrama, pitiless analysis and bruised romanticism. By the age of 40, he had become the second most widely performed US playwright after Williams.
He was fascinated by the violence that arose in American life from feelings of inadequacy. “This sense of failure runs very deep – maybe it has to do with the frontier being systematically taken away, with the guilt of having gotten this country by wiping out a native race of people, with the whole Protestant work ethic,” he said in 1984. “I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s the source of a lot of intrigue for me.”
To articulate the charged, often oedipal confrontations that littered his work, and its friction between progress and tradition, he forged a genuinely original writing voice. His runaway soliloquies made urgent, rhythmic poetry out of the banal. “I drive on the freeway every day,” says Austin, the screenwriter grappling with notions of authenticity in True West. “I swallow the smog. I watch the news in colour. I shop in the Safeway … There’s no such thing as the west any more! It’s a dead issue!” But he could be just as eloquent with silence, as he proved in his screenplay (co-written by LM Kit Carson) for Paris, Texas (1984). Wim Wenders’s plangent masterpiece reshaped the western as a modern road movie in which the wandering loner, played by Harry Dean Stanton, is mute for almost the first hour of the film.
Sam Shepard as a dying farmer caught in a love triangle, in the film Days of Heaven, directed by Terrence Malick, 1978. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount Pictures
As an actor, Shepard was a softer presence, cast early on for his wan, arresting handsomeness and his connotations of nobility. Later, as he grew craggier, his presence was typically used to denote grizzled tradition. He was fey as the dying farmer caught unwittingly in a love triangle in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). His finest acting work was as the pilot Chuck Yeager in Philip Kaufman’s mighty adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff (1983). Shepard evoked achingly the determination of Yeager, who had been the first person to fly at supersonic speed, to set a new altitude record even if it meant jeopardising his life. Burned and battered at the end of the movie, he falls to earth with a bang but gathers up his dignity along with his tattered parachute. The performance, which brought him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, marked the point where his acting began to blur with his writing to create “the intrepid artist-cowboy of popular imagination”, as John J Winters put it in his book Sam Shepard: A Life (2017).
This impression persisted in films such as the Cormac McCarthy adaptation All the Pretty Horses (2000), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and the Mississippi melodrama Mud (2012). Recently Shepard starred in the Netflix series Bloodline (2015), as the patriarch in a tempestuous family scarred by murder and double-crossing. The impression that he was having a whale of a time was enhanced by the suspicion that the programme makers had raided Shepard’s own thematic larder in cooking up the show’s heady gumbo. No wonder he looked at home.
Sam Shepard with Barbara Hershey in The Right Stuff, 1983, his finest acting role, which brought him an Oscar nomination. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros
He was born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, and raised largely in southern California, the son of Samuel Shepard Rogers, a teacher, farmer and former US army pilot, and Jane (nee Schook), also a teacher. The family moved around, living in Utah and Florida before settling for a while in Duarte, California, where his father owned an avocado farm. Sam was educated at Duarte high school, Los Angeles, and at Mt San Antonio College, where he studied agriculture.
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Though he claimed to have been a rabble-rouser, classmates later recalled a “nice, polite, quiet” boy. He did, however, clash repeatedly with his alcoholic father, and left home after intervening in a parental argument. He had various odd jobs and briefly joined a travelling theatre troupe. Ending up in New York, he worked as a waiter and started knocking out one-act plays for the off-off-Broadway circuit.
These immediately earned him notoriety. A double-bill of Cowboys and The Rock Garden caused an uproar by its profane language; a scene from the latter was excerpted in Kenneth Tynan’s 1969 revue Oh! Calcutta! Shepard’s work was said to have caused a significant cancellation of subscriptions at some of the venues that staged it. But along with controversy came acclaim: between 1966 and 1968 he won six Obie awards for plays including Icarus’s Mother and La Turista.
His own emerging creative life brought him into the orbit of other artists of that time. He became friendly with the Rolling Stones. Along with Allen Ginsberg, he was one of the writers of Robert Frank’s film Me and My Brother (1969). Less happily, he also co-wrote Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). “Antonioni wanted to make a political statement about contemporary youth, write in a lot of Marxist jargon and Black Panther speeches,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. I just wasn’t interested.” Shepard’s name ended up being one of five credited for the script.
Sam Shepard photographed for the Guardian, 1974. Photograph: Frank Martin for the Guardian
He also drummed for the Holy Modal Rounders and married the actor O-Lan Jones, with whom he had a child. At the same time, he fell into a seven-month relationship with the musician Patti Smith, and co-wrote with her the 1971 semi-autobiographical play Cowboy Mouth, in which they both starred. Another of his plays, Back Bog Beast Bait, was included on the same bill and featured Jones as a character based on Smith.
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When Shepard and Jones moved briefly to London to escape that imbroglio, he met the director Peter Brook, who introduced Shepard to the teachings of the spiritual philosopher GI Gurdjieff and encouraged him to think more closely about character in his writing. Upon returning to the US, he went on tour with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder revue, where he began a brief relationship with Joni Mitchell; her song Coyote was said to have been written about him (“He pins me in a corner and he won’t take no/ He drags me out on the dance floor/ And we’re dancing close and slow”). Out of his friendship with Dylan came a screenwriting credit on the singer’s film Renaldo and Clara (1978) and a co-writing one on his song Brownsville Girl.
Unsettled by life on the road, and with Brook’s advice in his ears, Shepard took up the post of playwright-in-residence at the Magic theatre in San Francisco and produced the plays that were to mark his most celebrated period and define him forever in audiences’ minds. Curse of the Starving Class, which had its premiere at the Royal Court in London in 1977, concerns a debt-ridden, alcoholic former pilot trying to offload his Californian farm.
In Buried Child, a dysfunctional family is haunted by the memory of a dead son and dominated by Dodge, the gone-to-seed patriarch marinated in booze. Shepard’s own father pitched up at one performance and began berating the actors on stage. “He took it personally and he was drunk,” the playwright said. “He was kicked out and then was readmitted once he confessed to being my father. And then he started yelling at the actors again.”
Sam Shepard in Blackthorn, 2011. As he grew craggier, his presence was used to denote grizzled tradition. Photograph: Everett/Rex Shutterstock
True West, about two warring brothers, dramatised what Shepard saw as an essential divide in human nature. “I think we’re split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal … It’s something we’ve got to live with.” (In a notable 2000 Broadway staging admired by Shepard, the connection between the characters was amplified by having the actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C Reilly swap roles on alternate nights.)
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Fool for Love (1983) was a feverish, motel-bound drama about incestuous half-siblings; Shepard also adapted it and starred in Robert Altman’s 1985 film version. Completing the playwright’s most distinguished period, A Lie of the Mind (1985) examined an abusive marriage. It, too, was haunted by yet another drunk, domineering father.
During this time, Shepard’s career as an actor was picking up. Though he made only a mild impression in Frances (1982), a biopic of the actor Frances Farmer, it was important for another reason: he fell in love with its star, Jessica Lange, with whom he was in a relationship for 26 years. They appeared together in the rural dramas Country (1984) and Crimes of the Heart (1986), while Shepard directed her in Far North (1988), one of only two movies he directed. The other, Silent Tongue (1993), was a mystical western starring River Phoenix, Richard Harris and Alan Bates.
He starred with Diane Keaton in the comedy Baby Boom (1987) and alongside Julia Roberts in the weepie Steel Magnolias (1989) and the thriller The Pelican Brief (1993). He was a good choice to play the Ghost to Ethan Hawke’s Prince in a modern-day Hamlet (2000) by Michael Almereyda, who also directed a revealing documentary about Shepard, This So-Called Disaster (2003), which followed the preparations for a staging of his play The Late Henry Moss. Other films included Black Hawk Down (2001), The Notebook (2004), Killing Them Softly (2012), an adaptation of Tracy Letts’s play August: Osage County (2013) and the thriller Cold in July (2014).
Shepard continued writing, acting and directing throughout the rest of his life, branching out also into short fiction – in collections such as Cruising Paradise (1996) and Day Out of Days: Stories (2010) – and a novel, The One Inside, published this year. Asked in 2016 if he felt he had achieved something substantial, he replied: “Yes and no. If you include the short stories and all the other books and you mash them up with some plays and stuff, then, yes, I’ve come at least close to what I’m shooting for. In one individual piece, I’d say no. There are certainly some plays I like better than others, but none that measure up.” For all the messy domestic histrionics that litter his work, he seemed ultimately to be grappling with solitude. Writing, he said in 2010, “is almost a response to that aloneness which can’t be answered in any other way.”
He is survived by his son, Jesse, from his marriage to Jones, and two children, Hannah and Walker, from his relationship with Lange.
• Samuel Shepard Rogers, writer and actor, born 5 November 1943; died 27 July 2017
Topics
Sam Shepard
Theatre
obituaries
Shepard, Sam. The One Inside
James Coan
142.4 (Mar. 1, 2017): p79.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Shepard, Sam. The One Inside. Knopf. Feb. 2017.192p. ISBN 9780451494580. $25.95; ebk. ISBN 9780451494597. F
Multiple stories and varying narratives are woven throughout this latest work from award-winning writer and actor Shepard. A young boy somewhere out West recounts scenes from life with his father and the strange young woman who had an affair with the father and now hangs around waiting for him while he is at work or elsewhere. The woman friend of an aging actor working on a movie set says that she is going to blackmail him with taped private conversations. Brief chapters, some no more than a few sentences, alternate with screenplay-like dialogs of a man and a woman arguing; dreamlike sections feature mobsters and a corpse of the narrator's father; romances long past are rehashed and pondered; and the young woman who was mixed up with the father dies or disappears, which prompts an investigation. Yet it all fits together into a marvelous whole. VERDICT Readers will get caught up in this work's many scenarios, as the observations of place and character ring true, and a world-weary resignation in the setting of vast Western landscapes permeates the narrative. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/16.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Coan, James. "Shepard, Sam. The One Inside." Library Journal, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 79. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA483702102&it=r&asid=fa0e52561fe70661e59352b3908d42e3. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A483702102
The One Inside
Donna Seaman
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
The One Inside.
By Sam Shepard.
Feb. 2017. 192p. Knopf, $25.95 (9780451494580).
In the newest work of fiction by celebrated playwright, actor, and writer Shepard (Day out of Days, 2010), a writer and actor on in years looks back at his life, while negotiating an increasingly volatile relationship with a much younger woman. The nameless narrator refers to his tormentor as the Blackmail Girl because she claims to have recorded and transcribed their phone conversations with the intention of publishing them. They clash in taunting and seductive encounters rife with lacerating dialogue that alternate with bruising scenes from his hardscrabble boyhood, when he became infatuated with voluptuous teen Felicity, who was having a scandalous affair with his father. In a slowly cohering jigsaw puzzle of flashbacks and jump cuts, memories and dreams, Shepard's piercingly observant and lonely narrator broods over the mysteries of sexual enthrallment, age's assaults, and the abrupt demise of his 30-year marriage in finely etched vignettes capturing the poignant moods of wind, sky, the open road, birds, dogs, and coyotes; high drama in a Denny's; absurdities on a film set; and hallucinatory visions of his dead father's corpse shrunken to doll-size. Shepard is a master of conflicting emotions and haunting regrets, and--graced with a foreword by Patti Smith (M Train, 2015)--this is a ravishing tale of deep-dark cosmic humor, complex tragedy, and self-inflicted exile.--Donna Seaman
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Shepard is a literary and cinematic star, and interest in this hotly anticipated and provocative work will be avid.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "The One Inside." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 20. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244761&it=r&asid=630fc273d23723a61073b5a7ac61e873. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481244761
Shepard, Sam: THE ONE INSIDE
(Feb. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Shepard, Sam THE ONE INSIDE Knopf (Adult Fiction) $25.95 2, 7 ISBN: 978-0-451-49458-0
An elegiac amble through blowing dust and greasy spoons, the soundtrack the whine of truck engines and the howl of coyotes.If one word were to define Shepard, the chisel-faced actor and playwright of few words, since his more madcap days of the 1960s, it might be "laconic." So it is with this vignetted story, with its terse, portentous opening: "They've murdered something far off." "They" are the ever-present coyotes, who, of course, kill but do not murder, strictly speaking--but Shepard's choice of words is deliberate and telling. In this Southwestern landscape, where the sand cuts deep, driven by the scouring winds along with the "Styrofoam cups, dust, and jagged pieces of metal flying across the highway," Shepard's actor narrator, wandering from coast to interior and back again, remembers things and moments: the '49 Mercury coupe that delivers his father's mysteriously mummified corpse home, the latter-day bicycle cowboys of Santa Fe, "guzzling vitamin water from chartreuse plastic bottles." Like a cordonazo storm about to break, the atmosphere is ominous, but only just: in Shepard's prose there is always the threat of violence and all manner of mayhem, but then things quiet down, the hangover fades and the talk of suicide dwindles and the stoic protagonist returns to reading his Bruno Schulz at the diner counter. At turns, Shepard's story morphs from novel, with recurring characters and structured narrative, into prose poem, with lysergic flashes of brilliance and amphetamine stutters: "Mescal in silver bottles. Tacos. Parking lots. Radios. Benzedrine. Cherry Coke. Brigitte Bardot." It's a story to read not for the inventiveness of its plot but for its just-right language and images: "Nothing but the constant sound of cattle bawling as though their mothers were eternally lost." Cheerless but atmospheric and precisely observed, very much of a piece with Shepard's other work.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Shepard, Sam: THE ONE INSIDE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479234685&it=r&asid=e71b21b8f69a91df4bf27395ed2efa9b. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479234685
Book World: Sam Shepard scatters a few off-script gems across a new terrain
Ron Charles
(Jan. 25, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Byline: Ron Charles
THE ONE INSIDE
By Sam Shepard
Knopf. 192 pp. $25.95
---
After watching a half-century of his legendary coolness, you either believe that 73-year-old Sam Shepard has the right stuff or you don't. Aside from his steely performance in dozens of movies and TV shows, he's the author of almost 50 plays, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, "Buried Child" (1979), which should be remembered as one of the greatest dramas of the 20th century. He's got nothing more to prove.
And yet now, "The One Inside" is being hyped as Shepard's "first work of long fiction," though it's not particularly long nor entirely fictional. Fans of his short stories and autobiographical writings will hear echoes of the playwright's life all across this familiarly bleak landscape. In her fawning introduction, Patti Smith, Shepard's friend and onetime lover, says, "It's him, sort of him, not him at all." By way of clarification, she calls his new book "a tapeworm slithering from the stomach, through the open mouth, down the bedsheets, straight into the bleak infinite."
That's a little more psychedelic than the narrative that follows, but she's not too far off. "The One Inside" opens in the cold, Xanax-blurred hours of an early morning as the narrator hears coyotes cackling in the distance. Just a few pages further, he imagines his father's corpse "wrapped up tight in see-through plastic. ... He's become very small in the course of things -- maybe eight inches tall."
Despite his diminutive size in that nightmare, the narrator's late father looms large in this impressionistic story. Like Shepard's real dad, he flew combat missions over Germany in World War II, and now memories of living with him wind in and out of more recent events in the narrator's lonely life. "I see my father in everything," he says. He's drawn back, particularly, to a period when he was a horny 13-year-old, and his father was sleeping with a teenage girl named Felicity. Hearing and, yes, even watching them have sex left a deep impression on the boy -- boys being impressionable that way. At one point, Felicity started coming around the house when his father was at work, which, as you might expect, did not lead to a happy family reunion.
But for all the haunted Greek drama of that recollection, much of the book's contemporary story has the substance of an extended, self-pitying sigh. In short, oblique chapters -- sometimes only a small paragraph floating on a page -- we divine that the narrator, an actor and writer with "a reputation for discarding women," is still reeling from the collapse of a long relationship. (There's no mention of Jessica Lange, but it's hard not to think of the actress who was Shepard's partner for almost 30 years.) There's an awful lot of wandering around the house, looking for the dogs, feeling bereft. He thinks about suicide, mulls his dreams, considers the smell of his urine.
He has other troubles, too. Following in his father's libidinous footsteps, he has very unwisely encouraged the attention of a woman 50 years his junior. He can feel people on the movie set gossiping about him. "Even in this era of liberal smugness it causes suspicion," he notes with a touch of defensiveness. "Taboo! Not 'age appropriate'!"
But if only he'd heeded those censorious voices. ... This ambitious young woman plans to jump-start her own literary career by publishing transcripts of their phone conversations, chats that apparently featured poetic commentary on their genitalia. We learn about this in a series of conversations called "Blackmail Dialogues," which are sprinkled throughout the book:
"I've been recording all our phone conversations, you know."
"What?"
"All these years. Yup."
"With a tape recorder, you mean? Like a detective?"
"Well -- "
"How long? We haven't known each other that long."
"A long, long time."
"Oh God."
"There's nothing to be ashamed of. They're very beautiful."
"What are? No -- "
"The conversations."
"What are you going to do with them?"
"Put them in a book."
"A book?"
"By me."
"By you?"
"By me."
"What about me?"
There may be actors who could bring this staccato dialogue to life, although if you've seen many of Shepard's plays, you know there are a lot of actors who cannot. That rapid-fire, back-and-forth patter -- like David Mamet's -- constantly threatens to slip into a manic patty-cake that sounds gratingly artificial. And yet, in another section, while working on a movie, the narrator explains, "The language holds the character, for me. Only through the varied repetition of saying words out loud does the character begin to appear like a negative in a chemical bath."
Such insights, often evocatively phrased, are the erratic rewards of reading this fitful book. Sometimes, they come in a single phrase, such as Shepard's appraisal of T.S. Eliot: "essential ideas redolent of stale gin and suicide." But the best parts of "The One Inside" are those least hobbled by its fractured structure and mannered dialogue. When he stops letting vagueness masquerade as profundity, when he actually tells a story about a real man caught in the peculiar throes of a particular moment, he can still make the ordinary world feel suddenly desperate and strange.
---
Charles is the editor of Book World. You can follow him on Twitter @RonCharles.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Charles, Ron. "Book World: Sam Shepard scatters a few off-script gems across a new terrain." Washington Post, 25 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA478867397&it=r&asid=219769a09342bd20f9c68bf29a3de818. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A478867397